Or, when life gives you apples, use Linux
Seemingly harder to remove with every eye-glazing gist and thread... A mac plagued with an is_mdm_removable=false Mobile Device Management profile: the worst! 🙂
First, boot into recovery mode by rebooting while holding down the Command & R keys.
At this stage, you'll need to connect to the internet briefly to download the recovery OS. This provides a few tools including like disk utility, support, an osx reinstaller- at the top menu, you'll find an option to access a terminal.
Once in there, you'll want to:
Disable SIP:
csrutil disableThen reboot:
reboot nowWhile holding down Command + Option + P + R to start afresh with cleared NVRAM.
Reboot once again while holding down the Command & R keys to return to the recovery OS. Reinstall whatever version of OSX it offers- instead of trying to deal with the slippery, network connected DEP plists & binaries contained within the various LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons found in the /System/Library directories directly, we'll let Apple finish with the ConfigurationProfiles first, then sneak in and remove them.
While this stuff is cooking, get yourself a usb stick and a penguin, such as Budgie:
wget -nd http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-budgie/releases/20.04.1/release/ubuntu-budgie-20.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso
umount /dev/sdc 2>/dev/null || true
sudo dd if=ubuntu-budgie-20.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=1048576 && syncBoot up again, this time holding the Option key for the bootloader menu. Once in the live usb system, make sure you can read Apples HFS filesystem:
sudo apt-get install hfsprogsFor me at least, I needed to run a quick fsck to fix up the headers before I could mount the osx filesystem living at /dev/sda2 (sda1 is the efi partition):
sudo fsck.hfsplus /dev/sda2Now, lets go in there and remove those ConfigurationProfiles:
mkdir badapple
sudo mount -o force /dev/sda2 badapple
cd badapple
sudo rm -rf private/var/db/ConfigurationProfiles/*🙂
Could you please go into a little more step-by-step on how to do this? I understand until you get to the Budgie part. I downloaded it, now do what with it? Some more plain English directions, please. Thank you!
Sure!
You’ll first want to burn that Budgie disk image to an external drive of some kind, like a thumb drive. The method in my post just uses the built in `dd` utility in Mac’s terminal; If you’ve inserted a single usb stick into your mac, the command:
umount /dev/sdc 2>/dev/null || true
sudo dd if=ubuntu-budgie-20.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=1048576 && sync
…would burn the “ubuntu-budgie-20.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso” disk image onto usb device “/dev/sdc”.
Lots of other ways to do this too, like with this nifty tool https://www.balena.io/etcher/
Then, by rebooting while holding the “option” key you’ll be able to boot into Budgie instead of Mac OS from the usb stick. Wait for everything to load, might take a while. Ignore any install or welcome prompts if from Budgie if it asks, instead go straight to the `Tilix` shell by hitting the “Command” key then typing in “Tilix” and then hitting “Enter”.
From here:
sudo apt-get install hfsprogs -y
– This driver lets budgie know how to read apple’s hfs file system.
sudo fsck.hfsplus /dev/sda2
– This normalizes the volume headers in the main Mac OS partition.
mkdir badapple
– This command makes a new folder in Budgie, where we’ll mount that Mac OS partition
sudo mount -o force /dev/sda2 badapple
– this mounts everything in that main Mac partition in the new folder /badapple/
cd badapple
– here we enter ./badapple/
sudo rm -rf private/var/db/ConfigurationProfiles/*
– here we forcibly delete all ConfigurationProfiles
cd ~
– here we’ve left the ./badapple/ directory
you might then:
sudo umount -f /dev/sda2
sudo shutdown now
…to unmount and shutdown.
Remove the usb stick and reboot.
Hope this helps!
-Jess